Last weekend, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law three landmark proposals to protect children from exposure to lead. The state will now require licensed day care centers to test their tap water for lead, demand doctors tell parents about blood lead test standards, and make state agencies provide more information to the public about blood lead test rates, sources of lead that poison children, and how the lead is removed or abated.

“We thank Gov. Brown for giving the issue of lead poisoning the action it deserves,” said Bill Allayaud, California director of government affairs for EWG. “There is no safe level of lead and the neurological damage it can cause in young children can last a lifetime. That is why it is so critical the state take these additional steps to protect California’s most vulnerable population from further exposure to lead.”

This week EWG filed aFreedom of Information Act request asking the Department of Agriculture to disclose details on the taxpayer-funded payments to farmers through President Trump’s $12 billion bailout for growers impacted by the president’s trade war. EWG asked that the USDA turn over the names and addresses of corn, cotton, dairy, hog, sorghum, soybean and wheat farmers receiving the payments and how much each is getting.

“Under law, President Trump and Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue are required to make the details about these payments public,” said Scott Faber, EWG’s senior vice president for government affairs. “One way or the other, EWG plans to get this information so that taxpayers who are paying the tab know where their money is going.”

“No one should be surprised that President Trump and his EPA are still fighting efforts to protect children and farmworkers from this dangerous pesticide,” said EWG President Ken Cook. “Cancelling the scheduled ban of chlorpyrifos was one of the president’s very first gifts to the chemical industry and Big Ag interests that helped put him in office. It’s time for the EPA to accept the science, accept the court’s ruling, and ban chlorpyrifos for good.”

In more bad news for children’s health, the EPA’s top children’s health official was abruptly put on administrative leave, which could be a prelude to shutting the office she ran. It has been rumored that the Trump administration has been eyeing the elimination of the children’s environmental health office. Many of the decisions by former EPA head Scott Pruitt and acting chief Andrew Wheeler have blatantly favored the interests of chemical companies and agribusiness over the health of children.

“The dismissal of Dr. Ruth Etzel shows the unrelenting hostility this administration has toward protecting the environmental health of children,” said EWG President Ken Cook. “It’s sickening to see how every day an agency that is supposed to protect kids is actively working in ways that will harm them.”

EWG, joined by food and nutrition companies including MegaFood, Ben & Jerry’s, Stonyfield Farm, MOM’s Organic Market, Nature’s Path, One Degree Organic Foods, National Co+op Grocers and Happy Family Organics petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to sharply limit glyphosate residues allowed on oats and prohibit the pesticide’s use as a pre-harvest drying agent. The petition also asks the EPA to set a stricter limit for imports coming from countries with less protective standards. This simple change could significantly reduce a source of the pesticide in Americans’ diets.

And to end the week on a high note, EWG hosted two EWG VERIFIED™ after-hours pop-ups this week. People in D.C. and Austin, Texas, met with EWG scientists to learn more about personal care products that are free from EWG's chemicals of concern. So far, 1,325 products have been approved for the EWG VERIFIED™ mark.

For coverage on these developments and more, here’s some news you can use going into the weekend.

In addition to the testing at about 10,000 child care centers, the other bills also require the state to report blood-testing rates and make data about lead testing, exposure, sources, and removal efforts on a county-level available to the public. They were developed as a package by the Environmental Working Group.

An analysis of Medi-Cal billing data by the Environmental Working Group showed that nearly three-fourths of Medi-Cal enrolled children were not tested for lead exposure between 2012 and 2016. Meanwhile, AB 2370–authored by Assemblyman Chris Holden, D-Pasadena–calls for the Department of Social Services and the State Water Resources Control Board to adopt testing requirements no later than January, 2021 to ensure that drinking water at child care centers does not contain elevated lead levels.

California’s new law requires licensed centers built prior to 2010 to test their drinking water for lead between January 2020 and January 2023 and continue testing every five years thereafter. Environmental Working Group (EWG) sponsored the legislation (as part of a suite of California bills addressing lead) as well as the accompanying budget appropriation.

EWG’s website says: “With thousands of personal care and consumer products on the market, it can be overwhelming to know which ones are safer and healthier for your family. The EWG VERIFIED™ mark does the work for you. When you see the EWG VERIFIED™ mark on a product, you can be sure it’s free from EWG’s chemicals of concern and meets our strictest standards for your health.

The Environmental Working Group and a handful of food companies have petitioned EPA to reduce the tolerance level for glyphosate in oats and to ban use of the weed killer as a pre-harvest drying agent for oats. The request comes after EWG released a controversial report earlier this year showing trace amounts of the herbicide in popular oat-based foods such as children’s cereal and granola bars.

The Environmental Working Group and other food companies sent a petition to the Environmental Protection Agency this week, calling for more stringent limits on the amount of glyphosate residues allowed on oats and a prohibition on the pesticide’s use as a pre-harvest drying agent.

After conferring with Soren Rundquist, the director of geospatial analysis at an advocacy organization called Environmental Working Group, it was determined that these lagoons unleashed all of their contents, an estimated 7.3 million gallons of waste—including decades-old sludge that Kemp described as “the worst constituents of hog waste concentrated”—into tributaries of the South River and the Northeast Cape Fear River.

The pork industry benefits from incredibly lax regulation. “The state’s top five hog-producing counties alone produce 15.5 million tons of manure annually,” Doug Bock Clark reported in Rolling Stone earlier this year. “An analysis by the Environmental Working Group found that 160,000 people living in the region may be harmed by pig waste. And those victims are disproportionately minorities, according to studies conducted by the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.”

One breached hog lagoon in Duplin County spilled 2.2 million gallons of untreated swine waste, according to Megan Thorpe, a spokeswoman for the NC DEQ. But based on an independent analysis by the Environmental Working Group, an estimated 7.3 million gallons of swine waste have spilled from at least two completely breached lagoons.

There is no rule against a lawmaker receiving the aid. And 33 members of Congress — directly or through their immediate family members — received federal farming subsidies over the past two decades, amounting to a collective $15 million from 1995 to 2016, according to the Environmental Working Group, a watchdog group that probes agricultural subsidies.

Bilirakis earned a zero percent 2017 score, and an 8 percent lifetime score, for his voting record on environmental issues from the League of Conservation Voters. He cast 17 votes over the past four years the Environmental Working Group Action Fund considers “toxic pollution votes,” earning him a zero percent pro-environment rating.

A panel discussion will follow the presentation, said Kristin Lazure, a producer of “The Devil We Know.” The panel is being organized by the Environmental Working Group, a national environmental group, Lazure, who is with Atlas Films, said.

His voting record prompted two environmental groups to give him failing ratings. The nonpartisan but liberal-leaning League of Conservation Voters gave him a lifetime rating of 2 percent. The nonpartisan Environmental Working Group gave him a 0 on a recent environmental voting scorecard.

In an interview with PBS, Melanie Benesh, a legislative attorney for the Environmental Working Group, said, “The EPA has received criticism, including from us, with regards to the way it is proposing to conduct this risk assessment of asbestos.” The “problem formulation” omits certain past findings related to asbestos risk, such as “legacy uses,” including the left-over asbestos found in buildings.

Eco-Max’s lavender dish soap also gets a nod from the Environmental Working Group www.ewg.org , a U.S.-based non-profit, non-partisan organization that has a handy list of terms, like “surfactant” and “active ingredient” on its website, as well as an overview of over 2,500 household cleaning products.

Another Organization that approves of Beauty By Earth's clean and non-toxic ingredients is the Environmental Working Group. As you can see here: https://www.ewg.org/skindeep/company/Beauty_by_Earth/ they are highly ranked on the Environmental Working Group's Skin Deep Database, a non-profit Organization that specializes in research and advocacy in the areas of agricultural subsidies, public lands and corporate accountability, dedicated to protecting human health and the environment.

Educate Yourself – The Environmental Working Group (EWG) is a lifeline when you start to delve into the clean beauty world. It is a nonprofit organization comprised of scientists, policy experts, lawyers, communication experts, and programmers who all want to make the world a safer place for us. It researches, studies, and tests food and cosmetics to check for toxic ingredients and then shares the results online and in its app. The skin-deep section of the website is dedicated to all things beauty. It has a database of over 80,000 products currently in its system.

The thought of consuming any amount — even a small amount deemed safe by the FDA — may make you feel uneasy. If so, Orenstein notes that “most manufacturers have removed BPA from cans as a precaution.” You can search the Environmental Working Group’s Food Scores site to find out if a brand is suspected to use BPA.

Earlier this year, Monsanto made headlines when the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released a study showing glyphosate residues were in a whole range of everyday food items, including oatmeal, Cheerios, and granola. But the science behind that report was shaky, and it was the subject of criticism, in part because EWG set its own definition for what an acceptable level of glyphosate in food, rather than follow prior, scientifically backed levels.

For people wanting to avoid exposure to pesticides in produce and watch what they spend, there are some fruits and veggies that are more important to buy organic than others, according to the Environmental Working Group (EWG).

It’s time to tune into the Dirty Dozen, based on the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) analysis of USDA tests on pesticide residues on conventionally grown produce. Even if you wash and peel produce, pesticide residues in conventional fruits and vegetables persist; almost 70 percent of conventional produce samples showed pesticide residues, according to the USDA. A total of 230 different pesticides and pesticide breakdown products were present in the produce sampled.

It's time to tune into the Dirty Dozen, based on the Environmental Working Group's (EWG) analysis of USDA tests on pesticide residues on conventionally grown produce. Even if you wash and peel produce, pesticide residues in conventional fruits and vegetables persist; almost 70 percent of conventional produce samples showed pesticide residues, according to the USDA.

A report from the Environmental Working Group says as many as 110 million Americans may be drinking PFAS-laced water. Nowhere, however, is the problem as acute as it appears to be on U.S. military sites where PFAS compounds have been heavily used for training in fire suppression and the chemicals have been routinely allowed to drain into groundwater.